Susan Stamberg's own little red book is filled with addresses, phone numbers, her son's shoe size, her license plate number, the name of a favorite lipstick ... and other priceless information. Beth Novey/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Beth Novey/NPR

Susan Stamberg's own little red book is filled with addresses, phone numbers, her son's shoe size, her license plate number, the name of a favorite lipstick ... and other priceless information.

Beth Novey/NPR

It might be considered nosey to thumb through someone else's little black address book, but that doesn't bother Mary Savig, curator of manuscripts at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. "It is very nosey and that's why I really enjoy doing it, " she says.

"We can read correspondence and read diaries, and we can find out so much more about their process as artists, their everyday lives, " Savig explains. The books show "the importance of their social networks, and how they would learn from each other and push each other to experiment in new ways."

Address books are relics now, but a young Archives intern named Leah Humenuck says the concept sounds familiar: They're for "artists or famous people having mistresses or something like that, " Humenuck says. "Like a way to keep their affairs."

Savig shows a pocket-size book American painter Palmer C. Hayden kept in Paris in the 1930s. "He has French phrases that he jotted down as he went along, " Savig says. "... He wrote 'I bet' in one, and even 'I love you.'" (You can see a page from Hayden's address book in the slideshow at the top of the page).

Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner's list of friends is a Who's Who of the day's top artists: Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and critic Clement Greenberg. Also, in their address book, Pollock's psychologist and homeopathic doctor. (Savig says she didn't try any of the phone numbers.)

Address books get messier and messier over the years as numbers and addresses change. The little leather-covered books get splotched, frayed and dog-eared. New York art dealer Holly Solomon owned a hulking Rolodex jammed with more than 2, 000 cards filled with the names of artists she represented: Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, William Wegman.

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